MacKays. But she spent every day grouching about everybody else.
“Here.” Cook shoved a bowl of unpodded snow peas at her. “Make yourself busy while you brood. I sent little Maire down to the village to see her ma and pa. After today, she’ll be too busy to do it, so I’m a maid short.”
Yes, she was brooding. Mistress to the man she loved, or wife to a man she could respect but did not have any fondness for? A life of leisure, or a life making herself useful? Rhona had no doubt that if life had crossroads, this was the biggest one she had encountered. And once she’d chosen her path, she could not retrace her steps. No going back. That meant this castle, as well.
She had a third choice. She could refuse both men and stay here. The duke rarely visited this, the least favorite of his properties, and his brother would most likely follow his example. She could stay here and let year follow year until she died.
She shelled the peas. Small, but welcome. Every fresh product was welcome at this time of the year. They had apples in storage in the barns, together with the few vegetables that could stand the cold. Brussels sprouts, cabbage and the rest. The men spent the autumn stacking the food and killing the livestock they couldn’t afford to keep over the winter, and the women lived in the stillrooms and kitchens, pickling, stewing and bottling.
Rhona always loved that time of the year, when delicious scents wound around the castle. She might never know it again.
Did a person savor the times they knew would never return or did they, like her, take them for granted?
By the time she’d shelled the bowl of peas, she had her decision. Tranquility returned, and she welcomed it. She would say goodbye to her lover tomorrow, just before she accepted Fergus Ruthven’s hand in marriage. That would be the end of it. A useful, fulfilling life with a man she might eventually learn to love. One who valued her contribution.
Heartbreak happened to everyone. She’d suffered it once and survived, so she’d do it again. And that was all there was to it. Staying in the castle, growing old, hearing about the life Frederick had made for himself? No, that would not happen. A waste and a shame.
Peas cured her. They provided her with a repetitive task that let her mind float and then come back to her, decision made.
She got to her feet. “The holly won’t arrange itself. I have to go.”
“Mind you put on thick gloves!” Elsie called out after her.
Frederick—Lord Glinn, as she had to learn to refer to him, in her mind as well as outside it—rose late, and had breakfast in solitary splendor in the breakfast room, or so Elsie told Rhona when she returned from the noisy and dirty task of supervising the men who’d brought the holly inside the house. They had bunches of mistletoe, too, and a few sprigs of yew, but Rhona made them take that out. Yew berries were poisonous. “Leave the yew trees for the churchyard,” her mother had always said. Rhona tended to agree.
“Is his lordship staying over Hogmanay, do you know?” Elsie asked Rhona as they worked side by side, brushing up the leaves and debris. Later, they’d have a lot more to clear up because the men were tromping in and out, taking the supplies to the rooms she’d designated.
Several buckets of pine cones, and some branches with cones still attached lay by the fireplace. They’d put some with the log to pop and scent the room, and use the others to drape around the displays of ancient weaponry arranged in elaborate patterns that were set around the walls. Rhona rarely thought of them except to curse them as dust traps when she and the maids gave them their three-monthly cleaning. Musicians would arrive from the village tomorrow night, and the villagers would come to dance, their first dance in a month.
“I don’t know,” Rhona said truthfully, “but I suspect he’ll be away while he can. If he can get down to Fort Worth, he can get across country to his brother’s house near Edinburgh. The roads will be passable for a few days yet.”
He wouldn’t want to stay once she told him what she’d decided. So perhaps he’d do everything he could to get away from her before Twelfth Night. The weather was holding, but there would be no traveling once the snow